If one is looking for the focus for the sense of shared values, it must be, as Aelius Aristides stressed, the city. The Romans did not, of course, create the idea in the Mediterranean, and in their conquest of Carthage, Greece, Egypt, and the Near East they brought under their control a vast array of cities, many of them with impressive histories of their own. However, there were Roman cities that were deliberately planted as part of the system of imperial control. First there were the coloniae, garrison towns of legionaries or veterans, established primarily for strategic reasons, especially during the conquest of Italy and a wider empire. They provided land for veterans who would have every incentive to fight to defend it. Many coloniae were placed on virgin sites (in the museum at Aquileia there is a plaque commemorating the first ploughing up of the boundaries of the colonia in 181 bc) but they could also be founded on existing urban sites. Colonia Augusta Nemausus, the modern Nimes in southern France, was founded on the urban centre, oppidum, of the Arecomici tribe, for instance. By the time of the empire, the word had acquired connotations of elevated status so that an emperor could bestow the status of a colonia on a city as a mark of honour. Vespasian, for instance, granted the accolade of colonia to the city of Caesarea, the administrative capital of Judaea, originally built by Herod even before Judaea had become part of the empire.
In addition to the coloniae, there were the municipia. The name was originally used of a self-governing community that had become an ally of Rome but again the term developed into a mark of status that could be conferred by the emperor. Below the municipia were the civitates. The term civitas, ‘community’, was used to designate an independent community, of non-citizen status, often based on a local ethnic group but not necessarily on a town, although it was rare in the middle or later empire to find a civitas without its urban centre. There were also the vici, often translated as ‘villages’ though the larger were the size of towns and the term could be used to denote a district of a particular city—Rome had its vici. The vici had no formal status within the empire and remained subordinate to the local administrative centre. They could, however, be raised to the status of a municipium with a constitution provided by Rome, often at the request of local aristocrats who wanted their loyalty to be formally recognized.
An example of such a promotion survives from the town of Irni in Spain. The town is made a municipium by Augustus with ‘Latin rights’ (see pp. 369, 376) and a Roman-style constitution in which detailed regulations are laid down for the election of magistrates, the conduct of a senate, and the procedures for raising taxation, using local labour, and administering justice. On the completion of their term of office magistrates would become Roman citizens, and with time a munici-pium, whatever its native origins, would become an integrated part of the empire.
Tacitus mocked the process of urbanization as he saw it happening in Britain during the time his father-in-law Agricola was governor:
Agricola had to deal with people living in isolation and ignorance, and therefore prone to fight: and his object was to accustom them to a life of peace and quiet by the provision of amenities. He therefore gave private encouragement and official assistance to the building of temples, public squares and good houses, he praised the energetic and scolded the slack; and competition for honour proved as effective as compulsion. Furthermore he educated the sons of the chiefs in the liberal arts. . . The result was that instead of loathing the Latin language they became eager to speak it effectively. In the same way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the population was led into the demoralising temptations of arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. The unsuspecting Britons talked of such novelties as ‘civilization’, when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement. (From Agricola. Translation: S. A. Handford)
Such may have been the view of a sophisticated and cynical Roman but the process succeeded in building loyal provincial elites. The steps by which a particular family could become integrated into the administration of the empire can be seen through the descendants of a Gallic aristocrat, Epotsorovidius. After the conquest of Gaul by Caesar, Epotsorovidius’ son emerges as a Roman citizen and combines Caesar’s name (an indication that citizenship was a result of Caesar’s patronage) with a Gallic one to become Caius Julius Agedomopas. Two generations later the family has become completely Romanized, suggesting that Latin may have become their preferred language. Gaius Julius Rufus, of the fourth generation, was a priest of the cult of Rome and Augustus at Lugdunum (Lyon) and a praefectus fabrorum, an army official concerned with building works. His wealth was such that he was able to donate two quintessential Roman buildings, an amphitheatre, to Lyon, and a triumphal arch, to his native town Mediolanum Santonum (modern Saintes).
Alongside the integration of the local elite into city government went the spread of Roman citizenship. Citizens acquired status and privileges including the right to take part in the administration of many cities, join the legions, or enjoy the benefits of Roman law. The physical mark of citizen status was the right to wear a toga. Until 212, when Caracalla declared that all subjects of the empire (except slaves and some categories of freedmen) were citizens, the process developed naturally as an individual, by virtue of a magistracy in a city or service in an auxiliary army unit, for instance, acquired citizenship and then passed it on to his descendants. A freed slave would also eventually acquire citizen rights if his master was a citizen himself. Whole communities could also be granted citizen rights. (More common, however, was the grant of ‘Latin rights’ to a community. This allowed it rights of trade and intermarriage with similar communities. Vespasian gave Latin rights to some 400 urban communities in Spain.)
The spread of citizenship did lead, in the eyes of the emperors at least, to a requirement of shared obligation in return. This was particularly important when the empire came under stress and one can see the insistence by emperors such as Decius in demanding sacrifice by all (which placed communities such as the Christians who refused to sacrifice to pagan gods under immense pressure) as an attempt to reinforce a common loyalty to the empire through respect for its traditional gods (see below, p. 564).
Decius could make his demand because the traditional gods of Rome had travelled with the spread of Roman rule. The constitution of the colonia of Urso in Spain (second half of the first century ad) shows that gods, rituals, and priesthoods were modelled on those from Rome, and, as has been seen, the imperial cult was also ubiquitous. In fact, it was increasingly a requirement that it should be a central part of any city’s religious life. In army circles, as a third-century calendar from Dura-Europus suggests, the imperial cult dominated public ritual. Yet once the formal recognition of Rome’s gods had been accepted, usually by a temple in the forum, there was tolerance of others. ‘Each province and city has its own god: Astarte in Syria, Dusares in Arabia, Belenus in Noricum, Caelestis in Africa’, noted the Christian church father Tertullian. The standing of these local gods depended on their prestige and the culture within which they were set. Even the most sophisticated Romans were attracted by ancient Greek cults, and at Eleusis one finds emperors and senators applying for admission to the mysteries. In the army soldiers maintained their private beliefs in favoured gods alongside their public veneration of the imperial cult.
Integration was further consolidated in that Roman or Greek gods could absorb the attributes of local gods. In On the Syrian Goddess, an account of a pilgrimage to Hieropolis by the second-century Lucian (see further below, p. 544), the pilgrim comes across a statue of Hera in the temple. As you look at Hera, she reveals a multiform shape. On the whole she is Hera by accurate reckoning; but she has something of an Athena, and Aphrodite and Selene and Rhea and Artemis and Nemesis and the Fates.’ The Platonist Celsus wrote in the second century that ‘it makes no difference whether we call Zeus the Most High or Zeus or Adonis or Saboath or Amun like the Egyptians, or Papaeus like the Scythians.’ One temple to Zeus in Libya honoured him in the unexpected role of protector of caravan routes across the desert. In Gaul dozens of examples of Mars with a suffix of a local god are to be found and the attributes of the original god of war might actually expand with the absorbed powers of the local gods. Despite the plethora of local gods, the elevation of one of them above the others, ‘henotheism’ as it is known, was common and there were references to one Theos Hypsistos, ‘the Highest God’. (See P. Athanassiadi and M. Frede (eds.), Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, especially chapter 4 by Stephen Mitchell, Oxford, 1999.)
‘Instead of loathing the Latin language they became eager to speak it effectively.’ As Tacitus noted, Romanization involved, for many, some mastery of Latin. As mentioned earlier, one of the most unexpected finds in recent British archaeology has been the series of documents written in ink on thin wooden tablets preserved in waterlogged deposits at Vindolanda, a fort manned by auxiliaries of the late first century ad near to the future site of Hadrian’s Wall. The letters contain official requests for more money to buy supplies, reports of military strength, personal correspondence between soldiers and their relations, and even women writing to each other to arrange a birthday party. The auxiliaries were not British but mainly from northern Gaul and the number of individual hands suggests that literacy was quite widespread. What is particularly interesting is that these native Gauls wrote in colloquial Latin, with much use of army slang. While some of their language remains untranslatable there are marked similarities with the colloquial Latin of graffiti from Pompeii from just a few years earlier and a similarity in the use of Latin (which is written in the ‘Old Roman’ cursive script of Vindolanda) has also been seen in texts on third-century ad papyri from Egypt. Here were subjects of the same empire, but of very different backgrounds, using their second language, Latin, in a recognizably uniform way. Much the same was happening in the Greek east as will be explored in Chapter 29.
World History
